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Government cutting special deals for special friends – is always obnoxious, obnoxiously bad policy. It takes a lot of money from innocent, unwitting citizens – and hands it to politically-connected cronies. It warps functioning marketplaces – when governments place their massive thumbs upon the scales to tilt the system.

We’ve just narrowly escaped the Barack Obama Presidential Administration – almost indubitably the biggest imposer of top-down federal cronyism in our nation’s history. Thankfully gone – their cronyism is not forgotten by lower-level government officials looking to continue the obnoxiousness.

One of the companies seeking to maximize this bottom-up cronyism – is Exelon Energy. They run nuclear plants in several states – and they are going state-government-to-state-government looking for crony bailouts. Looking to save themselves – at the expense of the many states’ taxpayers.

Illinois was the first state to cough up the crony dough. Illinois’ elected officials moved crony-quickly – so as to short-circuit any citizen attempts to oppose. More

Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist made an excellent recommendation as to how best to oppose the old school crony government pork known as “earmarks” – which was district-specific spending, benefiting that district’s Congressman.

Getting riled up at that Congressman was a waste of time. He was the vote-buying beneficiary of the government money. What you needed to do was rile up the constituents of the House’s other 434 members – to get angry at their respective representatives for wasting their tax money on pork…that didn’t even benefit them.

This all-other-hands-on-deck approach – needs to be used against all things cronyism. Get everyone besides the cronies – all along the ideological spectrum – to gang up on the cronies. Politics makes strange bedfellows – often because it is very necessary.

How we power our nation should be, like everything else, as free market as possible. May the most effective, cheapest energy sources win.

No government intervention or imposition. That means no subsidies or regulations playing favorites – picking losers at the expense of winners and warping and distorting how we choose.

Because market forces lead us to make the best choices. And mean that what is today a great energy source – may not be so great tomorrow. As we improve each, some may no longer be as viable. In which case – things like this happen:

Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant to Close in 2019: “The (Pennsylvania) plant…has lost $300 million over the past five years because of the decline in energy prices, Chicago-based Exelon said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.”

God bless fracking: “Nuclear power plants have been hammered by the natural gas boom that has slashed electricity prices in competitive markets.” This is how it’s supposed to go. More

The late, inordinately great Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of Great Britain (the last time Britain was Great) – and a towering historical figure. She possessed the spinal strength of ten Mr. Olympias. When once conversing with…lesser fortitude-possessing United States Republican President George H.W. Bush, Thatcher famously uttered “Remember George, this is no time to go wobbly.”

The Republican Party has a long and storied history – of being weak and wobbly. Thatcher favorite Ronald Reagan was the exception – a cavalcade of others the rule.

In fact, used often is the term RINO – Republican In Name Only. To describe non-conservative, weak-and-wobbly Republicans. I would argue the opposite is true. Ronald Reagan was the RINO – the steel-spined uber-minority in the vast-majority-feeble GOP.

We’ve just emerged from eight years of the utterly corrupt, constantly lying, law-violating and national security breaching Democrat Barack Obama Administration. About all of which Republicans did…almost exactly nothing. Lots of hearings and press releases – nothing of substance.

Republicans were led out of the Obama wilderness – by now-President Donald Trump. Against whom they fought – ten times as hard as they ever did against Obama. And now that Trump is in office – and doing lots of really great less government things – the GOP is doing next to nothing to back him. More

And instead has an incredible affinity for fake energy. You know – wind, solar, ethanol, etc. The alleged “green energy” – which is neither green nor energy. Alleged energy sources that are in many instances actually worse for the environment than real energy sources. That can’t even exist without massive government cash infusions. And that produce what little energy they do – in a woefully inefficient manner.

But when you fetishize a belief in the Greatest Scam on Earth – that would be global warming…ooops, I mean climate change – the real-fuel-loathing and the “green energy”-fake-fuel-black-hole almost always follow.

New York Governor Cuomo is rigidly holding to this foolish form.

You Won’t Believe How Badly Cuomo’s Anti-Pipeline Stance Is Crushing New York’s Economy: “The US Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy dug deeper into Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s anti-pipeline stance. They wanted to know exactly what the repercussions were for average New Yorkers, so that the governor can make a more educated decision the next time a gas pipeline proposal comes across his desk. Gov. Cuomo has blocked two pipelines — last year, he blocked the Constitution pipeline and this month he blocked the Northern Access.” More

When politicians are over-reaching, micro-managing busybodies, they are over-reaching, micro-managing busybodies on…everything.

Not a sparrow falls from the sky without a Leftist politician – who had been regulating its flight – imposing the death tax upon its grounded corpse.

When government is so huge – nothing is too small to escape its attention. It’s as if Sauron has infinite eyes – astigmatism-riddled, cataract-blocked, near-and-far-sighted eyes. The gaze is completely addled – but government insists nothing evade it.

Cuomo, With Unilateral Actions, Advances a Renewed Liberal Agenda in New York: “(A)s Governor Cuomo, a Democrat, nears the end of his fifth year in office, he appears to be embracing what he says is his inner progressive….’I believe when you prove the potential of government and you prove that is a viable option, that you’re going to see a different day in politics and a different day in this nation,’ he said. ‘That’s what New York is trying to do now.…’”

Cuomo seems to think nothing is beyond his Barack-Obama-esque fiat reach. The above November 2015 article documents Cuomo trying to jack the state’s minimum wage to $15-per-hour, preemptively, prematurely legalizing pot and blocking a proposal to build the state’s first liquified natural gas port. More

It must be difficult to be ensconced in an entrenched minority. Day after day, year after year – toiling away, knowing you may never see the majority light of day. It would be understandable if certain psychological results result.

Stockholm Syndrome is a possibility: “(A) condition that causes hostages to develop a psychological alliance with their captors as a survival strategy during captivity.” Defeatism can very easily set in. You embrace being the minority, and find ways to enjoy it – even revel in it.

The quintessential political example of all of this and more – is recently deceased former longtime U.S. Congressional Minority Leader Bob Michel. Michel in 1981 took the helm of a House Republican caucus – that had been in the minority since 1952.

Michel from all appearances was quite comfortable being down and looking up. He never rocked the boat, or the Democrat majority – and remained as Minority Leader for fourteen more minority years. And Democrats and the Left loved him for it.

Then arose Newt Gingrich and his conservative insurgents. Tired of being in and accepting the minority, Gingrich and his gaggle led a 1994 revolution against Republican Michel-esque apathy. And parlayed Democrat comfort and corruption – remember the House banking scandal? – into the Congress-rattling Republican Revolution. Delivering the Republicans to the Majority promised land for the first time in forty-two years. More

There is an argument oft posited in politics that if the Left and Right are both opposed to what you’re doing – you must be doing something right. That you have found the sweet spot of policy excellence – betwixt and between the ideological bounds that surround you.

And occasionally, that is the case. But not usually. Usually, if you’ve displeased everyone engaged enough to actually take a strong stand on things, what you’ve made is mush – that only the mushy middle can stomach.

We’re currently witnessing the making of mush in Washington, D.C. – the three un-passable phases of the Obamacare replacement. This is some serious mush-making – because Obamacare itself is just that awful, and We the People have been electing people to get rid of it for now almost a decade. So to leave this many people un-sated – means you ain’t hitting the mark.

Granted, no one on the Left is going to do anything to undo the awfulness – but they’re in the minority (in large part for standing steadfastly by this awfulness). But the replacement’s pronounced mushiness has also lost it large swaths of the Right.

Best move at this point? Pull the plug – and head back to the drawing board. More

Governor Andrew Cuomo – Causing the First Hole in the Democrat Dyke in Decades

Give Democrats their due – they don’t deviate from the Party line. No matter how absurd the things they’re defending are, no matter how insane they look doing it, no matter how much damage they incur in doing it – they do all of it together. They are the Lemming Party – marching in lockstep off of cliff after cliff.

At this point, it is inordinately difficult to argue that this all-in uniformity is a winning strategy. Much has been made of newly ex-president Barack Obama presiding over his Party losing over 1,000 seats up and down the ballot. But while the man, his awful policies and his utter corruption certainly contributed to this nigh total collapse – he himself was reelected in 2012. He managed to evade personal electoral culpability.

Thus the argument could be made that his fellow Democrats remaining steadfastly loyal to him, his awful policies and his utter corruption – was far and away the bigger contributor to the Party’s national implosion.

Lessons un-learned. The Democrats’ lockstep loyalty to Hillary Clinton, her awful policies and her utter corruption – delivered political neophyte Republican Donald Trump a huge upset Presidential win. In large part because Trump ran against just this sort of nonsense. And since Trump’s victory, the Democrats have as one done everything possible to impede We the People’s duly elected President. More

Playwright George Bernard Shaw noted: “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.” And American social scientist William Graham Sumner penned in 1883 “The Forgotten Man” – in which he rightly identifies the “forgotten men” as the citizens paying for the government fiascos in which politicians engage.

What brings these men’s wise words to a New York state of mind?: “Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a unilateral mass expansion of government – in the name of fighting global warming…oops, I mean climate change: ‘The state’s Public Service Commission (PSC) earlier Monday passed a new set of standards that by 2030 is supposed to ensure that half of New York’s energy needs are met by renewable methods, ranging from solar and wind, as well as hydro and nuclear power.’”

Is that gi-normous “green energy” increase possible? Not so much as it is highly improbable: “As of 2015, New York only generated 11% of its energy via renewables. A tally it has taken them decades – and tens of billions of subsidy dollars – to attain. And now they have mandated a nearly 500% increase – in only fifteen years. Predicated, again, upon energy sources that require massive, ongoing government cash infusions – and in most instances take more energy to produce than they provide.”